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I’ve been a Linux user for almost 20 years years now, and have been a Linux only user since 2006. Back in 2005, I purchased an HP DX5150 from CDW, and this is the story of it’s ongoing life. Continue reading →

First and foremost, I must apologize as I’ve given no love to my blog in almost a year. I’ve had many major personal and work events happen, and honestly, have just not had the motivation to write. Nonetheless, I just got back from the SouthEast LinuxFest, #SELF2015, and it was phenomenal; it has definitely reinvigorated me. Continue reading →

I’m currently in the middle of small-scale deployment for my company. We sell a managed-service, big-data platform. This usually consists of a mix of Hadoop, Elastic Search, Storm, and Kafka; but all of that is actually irrelevant to the current topic. The data center we are deploying in lives on VMWare and from the outside is locked down with the exception of a Checkpoint SSL VPN. I work for a massive and archaic company; seriously, we have 90,000 employees and we’re still using Lotus Notes for email. It’s like it’s 1997 again; and I can say that because I was doing IT in 1997 and remember deploying Lotus Notes in the Marine Corps. Given the nature of my company, it’s needless to say they are mostly a Wintel shop and are still trying to figure out how to deal with all of their startup acquisitions, like myself. My group, ie. what is left of our startup, is mostly a Mac shop. I personally use my Debian Linux desktop for most of my work because I honestly can’t stomach Windows, and would rather not deal with OS X. That being said, there were really no directions on how to get the Checkpoint SSL VPN working with my Debian Jessie/Testing desktop, or my Ubuntu laptop. So I did what any *nix geek would do and figured it out on my own with a little know-how and a lot of Googling. Continue reading →

Obviously, DevOps has been a focus of my career for the last couple years, and within DevOps, I tend to be more Ops focused. This would make sense given my stint at Splunk and a couple of other operational intelligence based startups. However, over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a startup that focuses specifically on big data platforms as a managed service. Having the opportunity to get an intimate look at these big data platforms, I’ve learned one thing; although big data has been around for while, and DevOps is the hot buzzword right now, big data isn’t going anywhere. Continue reading →

As a veteran Unix/Linux Systems Engineer, I get the question everyday, “What is the best Linux distro?” First, I can tell you, there is no best Linux distro; each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. Secondly, that is the wrong question. The question you should be asking: What is the right Linux distro? I can tell you that there is no right answer here. Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal published an article by Rachel Shannon-Solomon stating that DevOps is not ready for the enterprise. You can, and should, see that article here. In my opinion, this entire article is a plethora of ridiculous statements. Not only is DevOps built for the enterprise, it’s ready now; enter DevOps 101: CAMS. Continue reading →

As veteran of the IT industry, I fall inline with the 10,000 hour rule in reference to Linux/Unix Systems Administration. Needless to say, as a wrangler of *nix based operating systems, most people would consider me an expert; although, I rarely feel that way. However, as of recent I’ve been doing a lot of work on Big Data platforms, including Hadoop, Elastic Search, MongoDB, and using tools such as Storm and Impala. While the install of these platforms is trivial, I can unequivocally say that the tuning is not. Continue reading →